SF

Beyond borders

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

An uneasy double consciousness attends the able and purposeful world premiere of Benedictus — now up at the Thick House — whose plot concerns a back-channel effort to avert an impending US invasion of Iran. An international collaboration two years in the making, Golden Thread’s 10th anniversary season opener moves in uncanny lockstep with today’s headlines, which reflect the increasingly aggressive push from the outlaw centers of American power for yet another and wider war in the Middle East.

Benedictus (a project cocreated by Iranian director Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, Israeli playwright Lotti Lerner, dramaturge and Theatre Without Borders cofounder Roberta Levitow, designer Daniel Michaelson, and Golden Thread artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian) opens with the secret reunion of two old school friends, one Muslim and one Jewish, both Iranian born, and both former activists in the politically broad-based mass uprising that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s CIA-installed dictator, in 1979. That revolution was, of course, eventually co-opted by the right-wing fundamentalist bloc under Ayatollah Khomeini, and since then Asher Muthada (Ali Pourtash) has emigrated to Israel and become an arms merchant, while his friend Ali Kermani (Al Faris) has become part of the reform movement within the Islamic republic.

A mere 72 hours before the United States plans to launch its secret attack, Kermani (wise to the countdown) has arranged the meeting with his old chum in the relatively neutral and secluded grounds of a Benedictine monastery. But Muthada arrives first. He’s a nervous ball of energy, and after shooing away his overly solicitous hostess (a nun played by Lisa Tateosian) he habitually overturns the decor in an effort to unearth any microphones. This first impression of supreme distrust amid a web of John le Carré–type espionage is belied, or at least made more complex, by the affectionate reunion of the two men. In the smooth and genial performances by Pourtash and Faris, Muthada immediately becomes expansive and dryly witty as Kermani, with a gentle air of cosmopolitan tact, arrives in his mullah’s robes and wire-framed glasses and inquires into his friend’s health.

In the conversation that follows they rehearse (in dialogue inevitably somewhat didactic but overall nuanced and unforced) the historic events that have passed through their lives, the betrayed promise of the revolution, the political machinations in each of their countries that play on external fears for internal gain, and so on. But there’s a more immediate concern and a deal to be brokered. Kermani, with his eye on the Iranian presidency, wants Muthada’s help in getting his peace proposal to the Americans in time to avert the bombing. For his part, Muthada wants his sister and her family ensured a safe exit from Iran, which is loath to let her go.

(The quasi-familial complexity of relationships here is inspired by a real-life incident: the 2005 chance meeting between then–Iranian president Mohammad Khatami — on whom Kermani is clearly based — and then–Israeli president Moshe Katsav, who were seated alphabetically beside each other at the funeral of Pope John Paul II and ended up exchanging pleasantries in Farsi, being compatriots from the same Iranian province.)

The tentative arrangement reached by Muthada and Kermani leads to an increasingly revealing but politically frustrating set of further meetings, some involving a US ambassador, Ben Martin (Earll Kingston). Martin — Muthada and Kermani’s would-be channel to the US government and a fluent Farsi speaker who was among the hostages taken by Iranian militants at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 — is a hard-drinking and hard-bitten man (played with engaging conviction) who turns out to have a close if fraught relation to Kermani, a moderating influence and protective presence during Martin’s captivity.

While the play’s premise is a look behind the headlines at the real interests and history roiling the Middle East, these behind-the-scenes encounters have depth of their own, as each character pursues and cloaks distinct ends that hopelessly entangle personal and geopolitical perspectives. As the clock ticks down, Kermani’s parallel effort to urge the intercession of the pope (one of several references made by the play’s title) seems as desperate as it is unexpected.

In the end, the plot’s impasse is another jarring reminder of the play’s real-world immediacy. Resisting any solution within the terms of the discourse represented by the three main characters, Lerner’s script suggests something about the incommensurable contradictions not of language (since everyone speaks the same one here) but of the discourse of the political world they share, which has become too degraded, too warped by the interests and logic of power, to grant any way out but catastrophe. This bleak circumstance doesn’t necessitate fatalism, however, but implicitly puts the onus for an alternative elsewhere. Our perspective as audience — implicated in but also outside the power games that define the limits of the possible onstage — allows perhaps for another set of possibilities for transcending the old discourse and inaugurating another, built (like the play itself) on new alliances across an overwhelmingly common interest. *

BENEDICTUS

Through Oct. 21, $12–$25

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat, 2 p.m.); Sun., 5 p.m.

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF

(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Gimme lip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Do you believe in magic? Or voodoo? Or the links between ecstasy and long-term memory loss? If you’re a firm believer in the last, then you probably can’t recall the good ole days of garage rock — and no, I’m not talking about ’60s snarlers like the Seeds, the Standells, and the Chocolate Watchband nor ’80s revivalists like the Fleshtones, the Chesterfield Kings, and Holly Golightly. I’m searching the motley gray matter for that fuzzed-out, lo-fi, house-rockin’ turn-of-the-century blast from the early ’00s past, the one that teetered forth in the crusty, musty, mop-topped form of the Hives, the Von Bondies, the Vines, the Dirtbombs, the Strokes, the Detroit Cobras, the White Stripes, the Makers, the Datsuns, et al. In ’02 you were crap on a cracker if you didn’t come with the thes and the esses and the three chords and the loud, plowed, and way-too-gristly grizzly rock ‘n’ roll.

So where did all the good times go, troglodytes? The initial ’60s American garage rock siege was hopped up on the rawboned, blues-indebted British Invaders. But this time around did the bands simply get bored of the same few chords? Or weary of the uniforms? Was it simply another historical hiccup in musical trend cycles, a brief burst of energy fed by pink-slipped creatives and millennial joie de vivre?

Still, longtime listeners know garage rock never quite stops. The ahistorical trendoids who leaped aboard the bandwagon — who didn’t know your Kingsmen from your Chesterfield Kings or "Louie Louie" from "Talk Talk" — may have moved on to the next flavor of the weak. But snotty rock springs eternal — like mucus. Among the main remaining perpetrators today are those bone-deep bad boys with one foot in rock’s past and another in the future the Black Lips, the kid bros of all of those ’00s garage third wavers, who arrived kitted out with a tumescent, prepubescent sense of humor, a hot and sweaty live show, innumerable 7-inches, and now four full-lengths. I remember taking a listen to the Black Lips’ first self-titled Bomp! CD four years ago and finding that it rose above the pile of garage-bound by-the-bookers like so much toxic, nonnutritious, black-flecked, punky foam.

The Atlanta group’s latest CD, Good Bad Not Evil (Vice), finds them name-checking girl-group matresfamilias right up front — looking to a line from the Shangri-Las’ "Give Him a Great Big Kiss" with the album title — while still plying their grimy tricks: they sing the praises of "Magic City titties," strike pseudoreverent poses with "How Do You Tell the Child That Someone Has Died," and invoke the spirit of Professor Longhair and the 13th Floor Elevators while slamming the "ruthless old bag" that swept through N’awlins on "O Katrina!" The epicenter of Good Bad Not Evil might be "Veni Vidi Vici," punctuated by creepy slaps and skin-crawling licks as vocalist-guitarist Cole Alexander mocks, "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who’s the greatest of them all / My man Muhammad, Boy Jesus too / ‘Cause I came, I saw / I conquered all / All y’all, all y’all, all y’all / People look towards Mecca’s way / Sistine Chapel people pray / It don’t matter what you do / Holy World War will come for you." Call it flower punk, as the Black Lips are wont to do, or conscious garage rock or backpacker bop, but it sounds like the scamps are reaching past the retro toward some real issues these days.

Of course, the Black Lips won’t spill the goods. Not that they can, when talking to Alexander, 25, turns out to be an exercise in total frustration. On a mobile and on the move through Indianapolis with the rest of the combo, the vocalist kept dropping out — or hanging up — betwixt juicy tidbits on dating Osama bin Laden’s niece Wafah Dufour ("We discussed making some instrumental tracks and hung out. She was really nice and pretty and cool, so we’ll just see how it goes") and giving equal Lip to Israel and Palestine, performance-wise ("These things make it seem like we’re more politically involved, but we just like to have fun. None of the Palestinians were able to come to see us, so we played in front of a mosque with just guitars. There are posters everywhere of suicide bombers’ faces — those guys are like rock stars there. But the kids loved it and were really intrigued that a punk band would play for them"). Still, after spending more time yammering to dead air than engaging with the vocalist — and finding "Veni Vidi Vici" inexplicably skipping on my copy of the new LP — I finally understood: these kids were born under a bad sign, and how. Good bad, though, not evil. *

THE BLACK LIPS

With the Spits

Mon/15, 8 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

THE VOODOO YOU DO

RUINS


With the departure of bassist Hisashi Sasaki, drummer Tatsuya Yoshida goes it alone, boosting the virtuosic noise spasms and live and unreleased skronkercise of Refusal Fossil (Skin Graft). With Good for Cows and Birgit Ulher Quintet. Wed/10, 9 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BRUTAL SOUND FX NO. 43


The noise-peddling umpteenth iteration includes Winters in Osaka, Pink Canoes, Mykel Boyd, Kukie Matter, Mr. Mercury Goes to Work, Ozmadawn, and Head Boggle Domo. ‘Nuff said. Thurs/11, 8 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org

CRYPTACIZE


Chris Cohen, once of Deerhoof, and Nedelle Torrisi dust off their new Asthmatic Kitty combo, Cryptacize. With Half-Handed Cloud, Lake, and Joel. Sat/13, 7 p.m., $5. Mama Buzz Café, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl. www.mamabuzzcafe.com

MATT POND PA


News flash: ebullient indie rocker overcomes stolen gear and The O.C. associations. Tues/16, 8 p.m., $14. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com

Meat the Figurines

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› duncan@sfbg.com

I have a meat map of the world in my head, so when I hear "Denmark," I think of ham. If I think a little harder, I’ll come to kringle, that delicious pastry that’s ubiquitous in Racine, Wis., which is the closest I’ve come to Denmark.

My baby-momma’s of Danish descent, so I also think of the time her cousins came to visit and were amazed by the size of American freeways and our unnatural attachment to firearms. This quaint yet magical mental landscape of cured swine and fatty pastry treats is peopled by friendly — that is to say, unarmed — round-faced folk in wooden shoes, riding horse-drawn buggies down narrow lanes. (The arboreal footwear, which is Dutch, not Danish, and the stray Amish buggy are figments of my somewhat limited imagination, but it’s my quaint vision, so fuck you.) This place has a subtle, subdued soundtrack: When the Deer Wore Blue (Morningside/Control Group, 2007), by Figurines.

The band’s been around since the mid-’90s, when three plucky and puckish teenage Danes by the names of Christian Hjelm, Andreas Toft, and Claus Salling Johansen grew tired of their apprenticeships at their fathers’ respective pig farms and started jamming out on guitars. Together. Three guitars. Which portended a future in a Danish black metal outfit–cum–Motörhead cover band called Thunderfoot–cum–Glenn Branca guitar chamber ensemble, which never came to pass, as Toft moved to bass and Johansen, his arms sinewy with muscle from pounding pig flesh in Papa’s processing plant, decided on drums. What followed was the self-released 2001 EP The Detour and a 2003 debut long-player, Shake a Mountain (Morningside), which was never officially unleashed on the gun-toting psychopaths stateside. Figurines added drummer Kristian Volden, and Johansen and his ham hands — sorry, can’t help it — moved back to guitar. Their burgeoning pop stardom brought them bushels of free ham and kringle and, inexplicably — except in the context of this ridiculous yarn — truckloads of hot chicks in wooden shoes. The boys bought the fastest horses on the lane and had them augmented with pinstripes, flame jobs, and bigger hooves in the back.

The year 2005 brought a daring daylight raid on the John Wayne–ophile Huns in the dark, dystopian land of America with the global release of Skeleton (Morningside/Control Group), which I discovered on my desk between 100 mph drive-by-shooting runs in my stroked-out Dodge Challenger hemi, done out in General Lee orange with a giant rebel flag painted on the roof, natch. As Hjelm sings on Skeleton‘s "Ambush," "Chase ’em down because you’re angry." The band drew comparisons, by other music writers with imaginations even more taxed than mine, to indie giants Built to Spill and Pavement. The Built to Spill thing makes sense, as Hjelm’s voice does have a nasal quality like Doug Martsch’s, but the Pavement allusion I can’t figure, except to say that when music writers get a really good pop record and want to blow smoke up a combo’s collective arse, they trot out left-field comparisons to Stephen Malkmus and company instead of inventing lands of ham and horses. I don’t know — maybe there was something there rhythmically.

For Deer, Figurines have replaced Toft on bass with Mads Kjaergaard, formerly a wood nymph, after the former left the band to open a drive-through guns and alcohol store on an American Indian reservation on Route 666 in Arizona. What can I say? After touring the States, he grew dangerously enamored of our culture. Perhaps more important than this — really, unless they’re Lemmy or Jaco Pastorius, there’s not a lot of change when you switch bassists — they added Jens Ramon on keyboards, which is perhaps the single biggest mood changer on the new disc. Deer has an eerie yet upbeat, cinematic feel to it. It could serve as an alternate to Air’s The Virgin Suicides soundtrack, if the movie had a different ending in which the sisters didn’t kill themselves but instead moved to Denmark to shack up with an indie band — and then killed themselves. "What if we had a chance?" Hjelm sings on "Childhood Verse." "I promise together we’ll die."

Hjelm goes on to channel Brian Wilson in "The Air We Breathe," which, with its backing harmonies, sounds like an outtake from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966). On "Good Old Friends," Neil Young comes to mind: "Not sure what to leave behind / But I know we’ll be all right," Hjelm sings, the phrasing and sentiment feeling like Young’s line in "Tell Me Why": "Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself / When you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?" From here the band moves on to "Drunkard’s Dream," which opens with a sort of indie-ized send-up of Stevie Wonder’s "Superstitious," though the metronomic snare hits contrast with the funky guitar lines, making the track more akin to art rock à la Television than Wonder funk. "Bee Dee" centers around an "up the stairs and down again" guitar riff and has a looser, Feelies vibe, while the keyboards in "Cheap Place to Spend the Night" move from rollicking Farfisa to tinkling celesta.

Overall, while conceptually satisfying, the cinematic feel of Deer is not quite the pure pop bliss of Skeleton. Maybe it’s a bit homogeneous, rife with ethereal keys and moody vocals. Maybe our Danish Fab Five have been influenced by the resurgence of folk. The back-cover photo is a cross between a Little House on the Prairie still and a Flying Burrito Brothers portrait, sans rhinestone suits: two Figurines are wearing suspenders, and they each have a questioning, somewhat obsequious look on their face, like they’re about to collectively ask, "Howdy, stranger, can we get you a sarsaparilla?" But the record is ambitious, signifying the band’s willingness to change its sound with each release and not just hammer on what’s worked in the past. From their humble beginnings in ham shanks and clog dancing, Figurines dream big — bigger than I do, certainly.

FIGURINES

Mon/15, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Eat skull

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I knew I was getting into some trouble when I first discovered that Eat Skull — a noisome bunch of skuzz rockers from Portland, Ore. — has two members who used to bring the motherfuckin’ ruckus alongside Adam Stonehouse in the Hospitals. But I knew I was in for a treat as well. I was certain the band would have no problem channeling the Hospitals’ cathartic weirdness and crackling dissonance, and the scorched intro of "Stuff Reverse," off ES’s self-titled 7-inch debut (Meds), assured me the end result would be painfully loud.

Flushed with crunchy guitars, galloping fuzz bass, and psych-fried organ, the record’s three bustling numbers blatantly scream, "Garage rock revival!" even as the music also finds the outfit tapping into its hardcore and no-wave influences. Though bristling with gravelly resonation, organ gives "Seeing Things" an ultrasunny vibe, turning it into the four-piece’s closest brush with pop, while "Things I Did When I Dyed My Hair" sounds like a tribute to "The Cowboy Song" by PiL. Groups like DNA and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks come to mind too.

The recording quality sounds bottomless, as if ES is trapped in a well. Vocalist Rob Enbom’s hollers echo in and out of tune, the drums are barely audible, and the entire thing sounds messy most of the time. Enbom revealed through an e-mail that the band’s recording techniques are "four-track, eight-track, and Radio Shack" and that "the garage thing results from recording the album three weeks after we started playing together on a four-track, drunk." He also disclosed that ES dubbed their songs over some old Chinese opera tapes, which probably factors into the filthy sound — and the authentic basementlike feel. If this recording is a sign of things to come, I would suggest stocking up on plenty of earplugs before trotting down to the Hemlock.

EAT SKULL

With Scout Niblett and Monster Women

Thurs/11, 9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

More sad hits

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s been nearly two decades since Galaxie 500 broke through with their languid, fuzzed-out dream pop, and rhythm section Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang still live and record in the Ivy Leagued shadow of their Cambridge, Mass., alma mater, Harvard University. Perpetual college rock? It’s true their recordings as a duo have retained Galaxie 500’s moody overtones, but the self-consciously wide-screen canvas is gone: instead of soaring chorus and spiral-jetty guitar wails, Damon and Naomi emphasize smart pop arrangements and subdued vocal harmonies. Their latest, Within These Walls (20/20/20), is one of the coziest albums of the year, not just for its rainy-day production but also for the impression that the pair is totally comfortable in their bittersweet pop. When I ask the two by e-mail why they are continually drawn to downbeat melodies, Yang replies that it’s "the most melancholy records in our collection that get the most play — in some ways I think that you need to really appreciate the melancholy, the fleeting, to appreciate happiness."

For a project summoning such constancy, Damon and Naomi barely got off the ground running as a duo. Surprised by Dean Wareham’s stormy departure from Galaxie 500, the pair released a modest EP of songs under the name Pierre Etoile, but distribution problems waylaid the project. Burned twice in quick succession, Damon and Naomi rededicated their creative energies to Exact Change, a small press with an emphasis on reprinting experimental literature and writing by avant-garde composers and artists. Galaxie 500 producer Kramer hooked the duo for a one-off return to music, 1992’s More Sad Hits (Shimmy Disc), and five studio albums later, they’re still treading water in the afterglow.

Krukowski once remarked in an interview with the Wire that Galaxie 500 was drawn to imitate the Velvet Underground’s eponymous third record and Big Star’s Third (Rykodisc, 1978) for "the sound of a band after it’s been a rock band." Damon and Naomi are, of course, this concept’s incarnation: a band risen up from the rhythm section of a much-heralded breakthrough act, whose first full-length together was designed as a farewell.

All of their successive albums work within the narrow wall of this hushed grace, but the pair can hardly be accused of resting on Galaxie 500’s laurels. Besides running Exact Change and backing up Kate Biggar and Wayne Rogers (currently of Major Stars) on their Magic Hour project, the duo has worked extensively with Japanese psych rockers Ghost, especially with virtuoso guitarist Michio Kurihara, who has added his tasteful accompaniment to their last several albums and tours (that rare combination of genius and tastefulness, Kurihara will play with both Damon and Naomi and headliners Boris for their upcoming San Francisco date).

Damon and Naomi’s preferred status among next-wave elites like the Wire might seem surprising until you realize they were pretty well ahead of the curve in cultivating a pastoral, psych-tinged folkie sound (on prime display on "Cruel Queen," the Yang-fronted ballad that closes Within These Walls). Indeed, for how much they’ve towed the line of subdued folk pop, there’s never been any doubting the group’s interesting tastes: during our e-mail chat, Krukowski name-checks Robert Wyatt, Fairport Convention, Scott Walker, and Fotheringay as influences.

That said, the pair are never showy in their pop know-how. Indeed, the best moments on Within These Walls then aren’t about blowing minds so much as hitting the right stride. "The Well" glides on Kurihara’s guitar lines, "The Turnaround" paces back and forth with staccato strings and familiar harmonies, and "On the Aventine" finds a tender resting place between reverb guitar and soprano saxophone. It’s music for the morning after, for a foreign city, for taking cover: reposed, but still tender from the journey down. *

DAMON AND NAOMI

With Boris and Michio Kurihara

Sun/14, 8 p.m., $17

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Scavenging’s new spirit

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› culture@sfbg.com

>>Click here to check out our Style 2007 Guide

It’s a warm September night, and I’m standing in a crowded art gallery in South San Francisco, staring at a metal octopus that moves its tentacles when you press a button. In many ways, it’s like every other reception I’ve been to: a table with snacks and wine, a healthy feeling of snobbery in the air, and a swath of hipsters blocking my view of everything. But as I walk around I notice some differences. The smell of decomposing flesh, the sound of heavy machinery, the walk-in "free shed," dozens of trash cans, and the mounds of refuse on the horizon all suggest that I’m standing in the middle of a landfill. Which, well, I am. It’s the site of the art exhibition "Waste Deep," by Nemo Gould, the San Francisco Dump’s artist in residence. And what’s most striking? I feel completely at home.

After spending most of September with junk collectors, vintage clothing nerds, and art diggers, I’m now completely accustomed to wallowing in trash and noticing freebies. For example, before driving to the SF Dump this evening I ate free baked goods at the X-rated Cake Gallery in SoMa, scrounged through leftovers at an estate sale in Bernal Heights, and knocked back pints of free Pabst at Broken Record in the Excelsior.

Yes, friends, I have become a bona fide freeloader. But like my newfound partners in grime I shun the connotations of the term. I choose instead to see myself as a sort of hip cultural revolutionary, one of the loose band of entrepreneurs and artists I’ve met over the past month who shamelessly revel in their personal gain because, at the end of the day, they know they’re "working" for a good cause. Not only are we getting a lot of cool free shit, but we’re also helping to transform the traditional hippy-dippy recycle-reuse-redistribute ethos into something more refreshing.

The freestyle movement is growing. Freeganism, a ragtag philosophy of cost-free living in a gift economy, has gained some national attention of late — especially in these economically challenging times — and the freegan ethos incubated in San Francisco, where groups like the Diggers gave away food during the ’60s. This city knows a thing or two about priceless give-and-take. And thanks to the freegan types I’ve been hanging out with, I now look at scavenging as an art form, a party, and a necessary lifestyle, one that has more to do with fashion, art, music, booze, and friendly competition than with fighting world hunger, globalization, or the war machine. Oh, most scavengers are concerned with all of that too, but creating awareness (about irresponsible consumption and the effects of wastefulness on the environment and humanity) is the fortunate by-product of the lifestyle, rather than its focus — which is, of course, copping free stuff.

THRIFTY EYE FOR THE HIP GUY


My journey from a life spent paying to consume to one consumed by the pursuit of freebies began two years ago, when I moved into a new building in the Mission. My neighbor was Aaron Schirmer — a reclusive artist who lives in a world of secondhand designer denim, seminew Macintosh computers, and used sound systems — whom I’d occasionally run into on my way to buy cigarettes and Jim Beam. Usually we’d smile and nod. But one day while he sat smoking on the stoop, he flagged me down. "Check out what I found today," he said.

At his side sat a large bag of American Apparel man panties and a crate of old-school electro cassettes. When I asked where they’d come from, he rambled on about free markets, dumpsters, and swap meets. Then he stopped abruptly, fished for the keys to his house, and said, "Here, I’ll show you."

I followed him into a hallway lined with half-finished paintings and strategically cracked mirrors, through a ’50s-style kitchen, and into his living room. In the corner, beneath a dangling gold and green Eames-style lamp, sat a 50-inch color television. His bedroom walls were lined with random bric-a-brac and outsider art, and his couch was a row of velvet-lined theater seats. Schirmer spread his arms and did his best Vanna White. "Here it is," he said. "I found all of this shit on the streets. People leave piles everywhere, and I just roam around all day and pick through them."

I quickly fell into a routine with Schirmer, a retired world-traveling DJ who now spends his days spinning rare records, tending his garden, and scavenging. I would come over to his house after work, crack a beer, and check out his finds, occasionally claiming certain items for myself. We’d then scroll through the Free section on Craigslist to devise a tentative map for the following day’s scavenge. I rarely had time to join him on his daily hunts, but I quickly learned that the free pot is virtually bottomless. And I was hooked.

These days I roam the neighborhood (corporate dumpsters are always a good bet) or scour the Internet anytime I need something. On my most recent search I found a stuffed bunny, a six-foot-tall stack of records, a pair of cowboy boots, and — I shit you not — Sharon Stone’s old couch. But I’m no expert. Anyone can search a Web site, but it takes a true connoisseur, someone like Kelly Malone, to build a business from scavenging.

FREE-MARKET ECONOMY


Malone, cofounder of the Mission Indie Mart, spent 10 years climbing the retail ladder at places like the Gap and Limited until she worked her way up to a glamorous life as a traveling designer. But then tragedy struck — in the form of ovarian cancer and its debilitating treatment process — and she had to quit. After spending the first few days of her indefinite vacation watching television, drinking too much at the Phone Booth, and watching old movies, she decided to revisit an old hobby: scavenging. "I just started over and kept positive," Malone said. "When I wasn’t sick from the chemo, I was trash-picking for cool stuff to sew and reconstruct." Malone began meticulously scouring estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales for that perfect owl clock or a one-of-a-kind sundress. She also got into interior and exterior design, grabbing spare paint and building materials off the streets, then enlisting her friends to help construct a backyard oasis.

Soon, though, Malone’s home had morphed into a retro junk museum. Her backyard was now dotted with old benches, barbecue grills, sculptures, and a sound system. Clothes were spilling out all over the place, and she had enough paint to cover a mansion. It was time to expand.

Malone began taking her stuff down to the flea market in South San Francisco. She set up a booth with music and goodies, offered free beer and hot dogs to friends, and spent whole weekends selling dolled-up vintage goods and making friends with others who did the same. It was there that she struck up a business relationship with Charles Hurbert, a public relations representative at a marketing firm who has a penchant for outsider art and found fashion. Soon Malone and Hurbert combined forces and decided to look beyond sanctioned venues. Malone’s backyard beckoned. The Mission Indie Mart was born.

The first mart went off without a hitch. Malone and Hurbert invited swap meet–interested friends to set up booths in Malone’s backyard. Cheapo flyers were designed, beer was purchased and resold at cost, and reimagined found apparel was offered for sale. It was a thrifty one-off that felt like an illegal rave, and people loved it. Mission District locals swarmed Malone’s backyard and nearly bought up her entire inventory. When she held it again the next month, the mart was even more successful and attracted more people — so many that her landlord threatened to evict her. So Malone sought sponsors and a new venue. The next Mission Indie Mart will be at 12 Galaxies and will feature a set by DJ Lovedust, extremely cheap Stella Artois, and an even bigger collection of vendors.

The mart’s success suggests that this model benefits its founders, who make some income from the event, and attendees, who get cheap goods, as much as it does San Francisco’s thriving community of independent designers, vintage-clothing dealers, and the recycling-scavenging movement in general. Malone and Hurbert are proving again that with a little effort and creativity, free shit can be turned into gold.

FRUGAL PHILANTHROPY


That’s also what Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez, the founders of SwapSF, are doing at CELLspace — but for them the party and the product are more important than the money.

The couple started SwapSF a few years ago as a way to poach their friends’ unwanted apparel. "I had this friend who owned like a million pairs of limited-edition sneakers that he never wore," Lewis said. "The swap idea started as a way for me to get my hands on some of them." So Hernandez and Lewis, who have been throwing events since they met at a party five years ago, did what came naturally: they drew up a flyer, bought a bunch of cheap beer and pizza, and invited their friends to get down.

The idea has taken off, as I witnessed Sept. 22 when I threw a few shirts, a pair of pants, and some old hats in a bag and pedaled down to Bryant and 18th Street to volunteer at their recent event, the Most Hyperbolically Stupendous Clothing Swap Ever. It was to be a win-win situation: a little time in exchange for first dibs at free clothes. I arrived at CELLspace at 11 a.m. to find a DJ spinning downtempo hip-hop, a handful of kids sorting through bags, and Hernandez, who greeted me with a smile, a name badge, and a beer. I’d envisioned spending a leisurely afternoon sipping beer provided by Trumer Pilsner (the event sponsor) with about a hundred other scavengers, and the day seemed to be turning out that way.

But neither I nor the organizers were quite prepared for the four-hour clusterfuck that awaited us. Soon the volunteers were drowning in a mile-high volcano of pants, shirts, scarves, and underwear. By noon, the event’s official start time, a line wound around 19th Street. At 12:30 p.m. the place was packed. It was as if every hipster in the Mission had gotten wind of an opportunity for free music, beer, and dancing and had gathered up their unwanted clothes to join the party — a party that happened to result in free clothing for charity organizations like A Woman’s Place, the AIDS Emergency Fund, and San Francisco General Hospital.

FREE YOUR MIND


Since starting in Lewis and Hernandez’s apartment and then relocating, the SwapSF event has become so popular that it’s getting hard to handle. Even the duo have been surprised by its sudden and exponential growth. It seems that by using sarcastic graphic design on their flyers, guerrilla promotion techniques (word of mouth, stickers, blogs, etc.), and a refrigerator full of beer, Hernandez and Lewis have tapped into a new way to market charity events to a community of self-obsessed hipsters. Like Malone, the SwapSF duo see something wrong with the way our culture consumes and wastes, but they’re reluctant to jump on a soapbox — or even stand close to one.

Which may be why their parties have been garnering more attention and support than have the more traditional free markets that have been held across the nation for years. Malone and her contemporaries are creating awareness with no pretenses, no preaching, and no Hacky Sack–playing hippies. They are nurturing a world of gift exchange that speaks to a new generation of recyclers who enjoy the selfish thrills of scoring, a good party, and daytime drinking more than — or at least as much as — the satisfaction people find in collective self-sacrifice and charity.

Even San Francisco Dump artist Nemo Gould isn’t making his garbage art purely, or even mostly, as a political statement. "By virtue of it being made out of garbage, my art does make a statement about waste and overconsumption," Gould said. "But that’s not what it’s really about." Although Gould sees the danger in the complex environmental situations that create places like the SF Dump, his desire to work there had more to do with personal satisfaction than with changing the world. The dump’s Artist in Residence Program offers one of the most coveted positions in the city because it guarantees lifelong access to free garbage.

"There’s a scavenger spirit," Gould said. "Whoever has it is compelled to collect. Whatever comes after that is up to the scavenger."

The scavenger spirit is currently creating a subculture. Like skateboarders who view the city’s byways as a concrete playground, the new breed of scavengers looks at the urban environment from a different perspective. In their eyes the streets of San Francisco are aisles in a seven-mile-by-seven-mile warehouse of free shit. Their primary goal is to decorate their homes with one-of-a-kind furniture, dress their bodies in fly gear, and pad their pocketbooks, all while avoiding overdraft charges and, on the side, helping to generate awareness. In their separate and edgy styles, Gould, Malone, Hernandez, Lewis, and Schirmer have managed to turn this spirit into a lifestyle that doesn’t alienate people with its self-righteousness. I mean, everyone wants free shit, right? Who can’t relate to that?

THE (FREE) SHIT LIST

There’s a fine line between scavenging to make a statement and being a straight-up freeloader. Luckily, it’s up to the individual to decide exactly where that line is drawn. Here are some resources for learning more about the score.

FREEGAN.INFO


Information about strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism; includes freegan hot spots in San Francisco.

freegan.info/?page=SanFrancisco

REALLY, REALLY FREE MARKET


A monthly alternate-economy festival and a really good place to get rid of your old stuff.

www.reallyreallyfree.org

MISSION INDIE MART


Kelly Malone and Charles Hurbert’s unique party take on the freegan ethos.

www.myspace.com/missionindiemart

SWAPSF


Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez’s fabulous swap bonanza.

www.swapsf.com

MYOPENBAR.COM


A list of every open bar, happy hour, and extremely cheap alcohol event in the city.

sf.myopenbar.com

GOING.COM


A cross between MySpace and Yelp that focuses entirely on events, including a free section featuring happy hours, art openings, and concert ticket giveaways.

www.going.com

SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT


Official city site for recycling, disposal, and reuse information.

www.sfenvironment.org

SAN FRANCISCO DUMP


Learn about our city’s unique take on garbage and strategies for recycling.

www.sunsetscavenger.com

SCRAPEDEN SF


An art foundation dedicated to transforming trash into interactive public sculptures.

www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf

ARTGOODHITLERBAD


Mission Indie Mart cofounder Hurbert blogs his best scavenger finds.

www.artgoodhitlerbad.com

NEMO GOULD


The latest artist in residence at the SF Dump has been making cool stuff from garbage for years.

www.nemomatic.com

Ideals made reel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Joseph Cornell’s cinema remains the central enigma of his work," Anthology Film Archives founder and Visionary Film author P. Adams Sitney wrote in 1980. That’s a tall order for an artist whose near-crippling sense of doubt about his artistic worth, coupled with his hermetic tendencies, further enhances the enigmatic and curious air that surrounds his vitrinelike assemblages of bric-a-brac, Victorian printed matter, old toys, and star charts — ephemera gently scavenged from the scrap heap of history in New York’s dime stores and junk shops. While Cornell the artist and Cornell the man have become more transparent in the years since Sitney’s essay, the mysteriousness of Cornell’s films — their "roughness" and "insidiousness," to use Sitney’s delicious phrasing — still holds.

As with ballet, books, and music, film offered Cornell sustained aesthetic sustenance and pleasure. Though he approached filmmaking tentatively and always at a remove — his films are composed of preexisting footage, bits from films he had either collected or directed others to photograph — he had long been enraptured by the moving image, particularly in its earliest incarnations. Cornell and his invalid brother Robert had even met D.W. Griffith when they were young men, while America’s burgeoning film industry was still largely based in New York. In a 1942 tribute to Hedy Lamarr published in View magazine, Cornell gushed unguardedly in florid prose about silent film’s "profound and suggestive power … to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light."

The synesthetic rapture evoked by the silent star’s face can be seen as the organizing principle behind Cornell’s tribute boxes to 19th-century prima ballerinas such as Fanny Cerrito and silver screen luminaries like Lauren Bacall. Exquisite fan letters and reliquaries, these boxes stave off time’s indifference to their subjects, freezing them like exotic specimens in cerulean amber. Cornell used the same blue glass to filter the projection of his first and best-known film, 1936’s Rose Hobart.

Composed of footage from a decaying copy of East of Borneo, a forgettable Universal jungle drama and early talkie, and named after that film’s star, Rose Hobart radically recuts its source material to become a mesmerizing portrait of the actress. Cornell unstitches the coherence of Hollywood-style editing by colutf8g deliberately mismatched shots of Hobart, the resulting narrative ellipses forming a counterpoint to the rhythm of his montage. Projected at silent speed, its original soundtrack replaced by a repeated junk shop record of Latin music, Rose Hobart is Cornell’s ideal of film made real.

At the film’s now-storied premiere at Julien Levy’s New York gallery, audience member Salvador Dalí knocked over the projector in a rage, ridiculously exclaiming, "My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made." Despite the assurances of Gala, Dalí’s wife, that her husband was just having one of his episodes, Cornell never fully recovered from the incident. He wouldn’t seriously consider making another film until nearly 20 years later.

Like Cornell’s earlier shadow boxes, with their carefully arranged minutiae seemingly selected as much for textural as for thematic effect, his other found-footage films present formally thoughtful arrangements of disparate images. Bookstalls (dating from the late 1930s) takes us on a fantastic geographic and literary voyage; stock imagery of the Caledonian Canal and Vietnamese rice paddies is cleverly spliced into the footage of men browsing book stalls. Cotillion and the Midnight Party (1938) mixes footage of acrobats, tightrope walkers, trained seals, and what look like outtakes from an Our Gang short into a fantasy party for children (whom Cornell considered the ideal audience for his work).

The films Cornell made from the 1950s on — with the assistance of then-budding experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt — are much sparser and leave greater gaps between their associative ellipses. Shot at some of Cornell’s favorite haunts around New York, the films are far more flighty in their evocativeness than the boxes. They are records of time’s passing rather than defenses against it.

Focus shifts constantly in these allegories of change, in which the George Méliès–inspired collage of Cornell’s found-footage reels gives way to one trick: the disappearing lady. In A Legend of Fountains (1954) a boyish young girl stares out a window, then flits through New York’s Little Italy before disappearing in a jump cut. The camera finally rests on a junk shop’s window, from which gazes a porcelain doll, the inanimate double of our lost protagonist and also a dead-ringer evocation of Cornell’s most unsettling take on encapsulated women, the early 1940s Untitled (Bebe Marie). In 1957’s Nymphlight another young girl dressed in a white gown with a broken parasol skips through a park, the camera tracking her as she watches the peripatetic launch of a flock of pigeons. She too vanishes, her absence marked in the final shot, of her discarded umbrella.

Sitney writes that in Cornell’s work, "to encounter anything in its fullness was to come into nearly tangible contact with its absolute absence, its unrecoverable past-ness, its evanescence." Nowhere across Cornell’s creative output are the emotional contours of this experience of the ineffable — wondrous and melancholy — so fully explored as in his films. 2

JOSEPH CORNELL: FILMS

Oct. 12–Dec. 14, $7.50–$12

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

www.sfcinematheque.org

Golden Rice Bowl and San Tung

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you think chicken is restaurant food for losers, you haven’t been getting out to enough Chinese restaurants lately. And who could blame you? Going out for Chinese food these days is a little like voting in a presidential primary: there are far too many choices that seem far too much alike, and most of them turn out to be disappointing. But we mustn’t let ourselves become discouraged by mediocrity, which after all is the usual state of human affairs and the human beings who conduct them. There are always jewels to be found, glittering in the muck of the mundane, and the task at hand is the pleasant one of discovery.

The chicken-is-for-losers argument was put forth explicitly by Anthony Bourdain in his book Kitchen Confidential. When you don’t know what you want, you order chicken. Probably you will forget about the chicken as soon as it’s gone, like an episode of bad sex. But maybe you won’t forget, if you were lucky or wise enough to have the dry-fried chicken, and to have had it at either of a pair of places on Irving in the Inner Sunset: San Tung or Golden Rice Bowl. As Chinese restaurants in the city go, these places look like strictly neighborhood joints, with not much in the way of décor or other atmospherics, and service that’s not exactly coddling, though friendly and competent. But the chicken!

And what is dry-fried chicken, exactly? It could begin with either wings or thigh meat — but thigh meat, which is boneless, gives a higher edible yield. The pieces of flesh are dipped in batter or otherwise given some kind of coating, then fried in oil until lightly crisped. The result is a heap of golden chunks and shards, juicy within envelopes of delicate crunch. There might be a discreet flow of spicy sauce. For those who like a certain muscularity in their Chinese cooking, dry-fried chicken could be just the ticket, and the variations between the approaches taken by the respective kitchens at San Tung and Golden Rice Bowl will be a prod to ongoing interest.

We found San Tung’s version ($5.50 at lunch, $8 at dinner) to consist of large, flattish chunks of meat, like rocks you could skip across a pond on a summer afternoon. The chunks had been battered and fried to a sturdy gold, with ginger, garlic, and red chile peppers lending an appealingly blunt heat to the proceedings. Across the street, meanwhile, Golden Rice Bowl’s edition ($5.50 at lunch, $8.25 at dinner) gave its slightly more cylindrical bits of meat a coating that was less batter looking than some kind of dredging (in cornmeal and pepper); after the hot-oil treatment, the textural effect was similar to that of pepper-fried calamari. The dish also included a slightly sweet sauce, as glossy and dark as molasses and dotted with chunks of red chili pepper for a bit of heat. And the winner is … a draw.

I don’t mean to imply that the two restaurants are identical, or even fraternal, twins. San Tung seems to be, overall, more of a spice-heat palace, as suggested by the little complimentary plate of kimchee that’s brought to your table after you’re seated. (At Golden Rice Bowl, the nibble consists of daikon and carrot sticks, on the sweet side of pickled.) Perhaps the fire accounts for San Tung’s throngs of the young and the trendy; Golden Rice Bowl’s demographic appears to be a little older, less noisy, and distinctly Asian — this last detail always reassuring, at least to this occidental person.

More San Tung zing can be found in the three deluxe spicy sauce noodles ($7), a quite large bowl filled with linguinelike homemade noodles, shrimp, calamari, and scallops in a reddish, sweet-heat sauce under a rough green cap of cucumber splinters. Across the street at GRB you can get something similar and just as tasty but milder: seafood Hong Kong–<\d>style crispy noodles ($7.25), a stir-fry of shellfish, calamari, snow peas, carrot sticks, whole baby shiitake mushrooms, and leaves of nappa cabbage laid atop a broad nest of crisped vermicelli-style noodles. The well-modulated tone here seems rather Cantonese.

Soups track a similar divide. San Tung’s hot and sour soup ($4.95), chockablock with strips of tofu, peas, bamboo shoots, and willow-tree mushrooms, arrives on the tongue with a nice sourness but later releases a pepper heat that vents up through one’s nostrils. Golden Rice Bowl’s seaweed egg flower soup ($4.50), on the other hand, is almost like liquid sushi, with its black webbings of kelp giving off their subtle but distinctive odor; ballast (and some color) is provided by diced root vegetables and peas.

We pause briefly to acknowledge San Tung’s fabulous shrimp and leek dumplings ($6.50 for 12 — a deal). The menu describes them as "little," but really they’re about the size and shape of potstickers, though steamed instead of pan-fried. What is most remarkable is their richly juicy filling, a fragrant blend of ground shrimp mixed with ginger, garlic, and Chinese chives. You could make a meal out of a plate of these.

Golden Rice Bowl has an aquarium — a nice touch, especially since it’s purely decorative and not a holding tank full of creatures waiting to be plucked out and turned into somebody’s dinner. The place is also more gently lit than its neighbor across the way, where overhead lights glare and the atmosphere is not for the faint of heart — or who are, as we used to say in grade school, chicken.

GOLDEN RICE BOWL

Daily, 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1030 Irving, SF

(415) 731-8110

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

SAN TUNG

Mon.–Tues. and Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1031 Irving, SF

(415) 242-0828

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Viz

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› superego@sfbg.com

I had a third eye once. It rolled off my forehead at a ’93 rave in an abandoned Detroit airplane hangar and across the huge cement dance floor, barely missing getting squashed by hyperkinetic Canadians and nitrous-giddy kiddies swarming after an airborne fleet of inflated latex bananas. People wore bigger shoes back then, so I panicked slightly and gave chase. A kaleidoscopic Marble of Ethos, my third eye led me huffing and puffing past the ecstatic hordes thronging DJ Tommy Tomato, along a vibrating line of indoor porta-potties, and straight to the back of the building, where an ancient water main had burst — right above the chugging generator that powered the big-screen visuals.

Uh-oh. I had seen the future, and it was either blown up or electrocuted. Eek!

Beyond any possible medical emergencies, the situation also posed a personal dilemma: I was the party’s host, and violent death was still, like, totally goth. If something awful happened to the partygoers, would I ever be worthy of my fuchsia JNCO jeans and "Snap, Crackle, and Rave" Freshjive T-shirt again? I launched into damage-control mode. Through the creative use of several rolls of duct tape, a swaying 50-foot ladder, and reams of shocking profanity, I managed to keep the eye candy flowing and my fragile rep intact. Thanks, bodhisattva or whoever! Every time I see a white lady with a rolled-up yoga mat sticking out of her purse, I think of you.

I never really dug rave visuals much. Too many mushrooming acid blobs, clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and primitive Max Headroom avatars flinging their awkward limbs across the blurry cosmos. But the whole rave thing was about much more than the music, thank goddess, and if I had to suffer through 15 hours of mighty morphin’ neon fractals for the cause of "community expression," so be it. Besides, the use of goofy visuals in Clubland has been around since its modern beginning, when Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic lava-lamp projections glanced off silver cloud balloons. It’s historical.

But now that wild optical shenanigans seem to have migrated from the dance floor to the screen saver, conceptual-art gallery, Burning Man shade structure, and stadium JumboTron, I mostly notice them by their absence. The current vogue for projecting pornos onto club walls doesn’t count — far too easy — and don’t get me started on horrendous video bars. Bleh. Even the freakin’ LoveFest skipped the visuals this year, though the music went far into twilight.

Still, there’s a devious little visual world opening up in the clubs these days, one that goes far beyond simple VJs, and, curiously, much of it’s coming from young kids who have no background in rave at all. The most ubiquitous of these new projectionists goes by the name of 3 and claims installation art, noisecore, and Pink Floyd as influences despite working his overlapping-image magic at many house and drag venues, such as the Endup, Underground SF, Trannyshack, Pink, and Supperclub.

"I escaped my extremely conservative family — I’m a recovering Pentecostal — and wound up at 5lowershop," a noisecore artists’ collective, the 27-year-old 3 told me over the phone. "I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what kind. I started taking pictures of people’s artwork, overlaying the images two at a time and adding a found image of my own that I thought knocked everything to another level. Three images into one, thus the name. I got a handle on the technology and started projecting at friends’ parties a few years ago. People seemed hungry for club visuals. Even though I know almost nothing about electronic music, I love adding another dimension, to jump people’s minds off the musical track."

Although self-taught, 3 can get pretty deep with his visual knowledge. He particularly admires the psychosexual design philosophy of Dr. Jallen Rix and the software wizardry of Spot Draves, who created the Electric Sheep communal screen-saver program. Taken from a laptop-stored image bank of hundreds of thousands of manipulated photos and clips and mixed live with Resolume software, 3’s work can seem electrifying in a typical rave-visuals way at first glance (trippy flashback effects, flaming Maori poi twirlers, etc.), but subtexts peek out: a tart-eyed deconstruction of vintage gay photographs in his huge projections at the Castro’s Pink Saturday party, for example, or a tiny yet virulent stream of social commentary splashed across a performing drag queen’s splayed angel wings. And 3 has a knack for dropping startling film clips of Hitler Youth and Vietnam napalm-bombing campaigns into sets designed around softer themes.

"The visual medium is so incredibly powerful right now," he told me. "The world is basically videos. We can’t look away. I hope some of my stuff shakes people up, forms a bubble and then bursts it. That may be strange on a dance floor, and that’s why I do it.

"But in the end, I really just want to make everything pretty," he continued. "I want to take this thing as far as I can go, get incredibly famous, and make the whole world beautiful. How egotistical is that?"
www.visualsby3.com

Jack Davis, 1940-2007

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› news@sfbg.com

Jack Davis was a relentless and often unheralded advocate for underfunded, outflanked, and ignored artists, community groups, social movements, and others shunted aside by mainstream venues and the art establishment.

Davis died Sept. 23 at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia from injuries sustained in a car accident. He was born Nov. 16, 1940, in Phoenix, Ariz., and came to California to attend the University of Santa Clara and San Francisco State University in the late 1950s and ’60s. He studied theater arts in Northern California, then was one of the directors and founding actors of the South Coast Repertory in Orange County. He married Judith Watson and returned to San Francisco in 1968.

Well known in the underground art world that he helped pioneer, Davis was a pivotal figure in the growth and public awareness of hundreds of uniquely San Francisco creative projects. For nearly 20 years he was director of the SomArts Cultural Center, which provides classrooms and work space for community-based programs and theater and gallery access to nascent and established artists.

But his contributions went far beyond SomArts. He and Rene Yáñez helped found CELLspace, a unique community and cultural center in the Mission. Davis was an early supporter of Burning Man and hosted its parties, meetings, and large-scale events at SomArts. He also provided technical support and counsel for the Day of the Dead and other San Francisco street events.

Under his leadership SomArts hosted myriad edgy and unconventional troupes and shows. Davis hosted early events by Survival Research Laboratories, which essentially created the machine-and-fire art scene that is now renowned around the world. Davis would often need to run interference with the Fire Department and other authorities who were concerned about the SRL’s seemingly dangerous experimentation.

Davis assisted in the evolution of that scene at every step, recently providing support services so the Flaming Lotus Girls could bring their massive Serpent Mother project to the "Robodock" festival in Amsterdam last month. Other SomArts projects Davis facilitated include the offbeat Naughty Santa’s Black Market, the Queer Arts Festival, Balinese shadow theater, DadaFest, the SF Electronic Music Festival, and the SF Indie Fest.

Davis also helped win national recognition for the alt-art movement by working with Eric Val Reuther, a panelist for and consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts, to bring many worthwhile (and underfunded) groups to the attention of the NEA. Davis also cofounded the Neighborhood Arts Program National Organizing Committee and helped set up its West Coast office in San Francisco.

Among the community-based groups Davis helped establish were the Bayview Opera House, the Native American Cultural Center, the Mission Cultural Center, and the Western Addition Cultural Center. He helped create a theater at Lone Mountain College, was director of Intersection for the Arts, and organized the San Francisco Blues Festival with Tom Mazzolini. In the summer Davis and his son Hayden and their friend Ernie Rivera built stages and performance areas for street fairs and other events.

As director of Intersection for the Arts, Davis hosted many unknown performers who went on to acclaim in the larger world of theater, including Diane di Prima, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Carroll, Ntozake Shange, Bill Irwin, Paul Dresher, and Rinde Eckert. Other groups Davis supported include the SF Mime Troupe, the Farm, the Pickle Family Circus, Make a Circus, and Dance Mission. Davis and George Coates were cofounders in the 1980s of the San Francisco International Theater Festival, which brought the early work of Spaulding Grey and others to the public’s attention.

"Jack was unflappable — nothing threw him," Coates once told me.

Davis lived on a houseboat — one of three he built over the years — with his daughter, Sarah, and his son-in-law, Shawn Lytle, in Mission Creek in San Francisco’s China Basin. As the longtime president of the Mission Creek Harbor Association, Davis fought developers and bureaucrats in a never-ending battle for the right of an organic, human-scale community to simply exist in this city. Many a weekend afternoon Davis could be found tinkering away on his or perhaps one of his neighbors’ boats. Due in great part to Davis’s efforts, Mission Creek remains one of San Francisco’s garden spots, even while surrounded by new development.

Davis was seen as a Buddha-like figure in the often-fractious world of community arts and politics. He was a bear of a man who exuded a preternatural calm. Composer, producer, and photographer Doug McKechnie noted once after a particularly rough MCHA meeting, "I was in awe of his ability to get things done with such grace, style, and simplicity. He could come into a crowd of bickering people, and they listened."

Davis was also instrumental in rejuvenating the Bay View Boat Club. "One day in 1984, Jack called me up and said, ‘Meet me at the Bay View Boat Club,’>" McKechnie said. "He showed me around the place and said, ‘I think this place has tremendous potential. Let’s join and see what we can do.’ Jack talked the club into having a special, one-year membership drive that allowed people who didn’t have a boat to join. We called everyone we knew, and before you could say ‘Bottle of beer’ the club had 200 new members, all of whom eventually got boats. Jack was elected commodore two years later and set the model for what is still one of the most astonishing, real, funky places in the world."

Davis is survived by his wife, Noriko Tanaka; ex-wife, Judith Davis; daughter, Sarah Coseby Davis; son-in-law, Shawn Lytle; son Arthur Fumiko Davis; daughter-in-law, Tesa Davis; grandchildren, Jordan Alexander Davis, Jacquelyn Rae Davis, and Olivia Davis Lytle; brother, Bill Davis; sister, Lynn Davis; and cousins, Patty Costello, Martha de la Cruz, and Amy de la Cruz. Jack’s mother, Jean Davis Mueller, age 94, resides in Scottsdale, Ariz. His son Hayden Carlos Davis died in 1999.

A celebration of Jack Davis’s life will be held Nov. 18 at the SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF, from 3 to 8 p.m. The family is establishing a scholarship fund for Arthur Davis. For information visit www.somarts.org.

Jack Davis will be deeply missed by all who were touched by his calm, generosity, and soothing presence over his 40-year involvement in Bay Area arts. 2

Mike Noland and Charlie Gadeken contributed to this report.

Casanova Lounge: Vancouver International Film Festival, Part Two

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Fueled by cinema love more than just biz deal BS, the Vancouver International Film Festival offers a chance to not only see films by upcoming directors, but also to see the directors themselves outside the movie theatre. One great example this year was a night in which Serge Bozon, director of the acclaimed La France, transformed into DJ Bozon.

serge1.jpg

At an upstairs bar on Richards Street, Bozon spun 45s from his collection of rare ‘60s garage rock, Northern Soul and Motown vinyl. Cinemascope editor and VIFF programmer Mark Peranson told me that Bozon has paid thousands of dollars on eBay for a single coveted disc. It’s not for nothing that this director has a film (which I’d love to see) titled Mods: he was coiffed and styled like a Gallic cousin of Linton from SF’s gone but not forgotten Popscene progenitors the Aisler’s Set. In a nod to the Northwest, he played the Sonics. But what about his movie?

Bless the animalia

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I completely spaced that last Thursday, Oct 4, was World Animal Day (known to the more ecumenical among us as the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi) — I was probably busy beating my kitty. KIDDING! I was beating my fish. But fur flew in the City, I bet, as many people hauled their four-footed friends to church to have them blessed.

No comment on that. (What’s the Latin for ringworm again? Tinea.) But there’s a pretty nifty gallery show right now at David Cunningham Projects in SoMa that pays tribute to the wee people in fur coats, called “Animal Rites.” It features works of artists as various as Ireland’s Michael Beirne, fab homegirl Kerri Lee Johnson, and even an anonymous artist from the 17th century. Stop by and pet your eyes. And click here for more info, including some more neato images.

michaelbierne.jpg
Michael Beirne, Untitled, 2004

kerrileejohnson.jpg
Kerri Lee Johnson, Rabbithead girl, boy, horse

“Animal Rites”
Through Nov. 10
David Cunningham Projects
1928 Folsom, SF
415-341-1538
www.davidcunninghamprojects.com

Acousticity

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The Night of the Hunter is at the top of a list of favorite films compiled by Colleen, a.k.a. Parisian musician Cécile Schott, and Iker Spazio’s lovely cover art for the new Colleen album, Les Ondes Silencieuses (Leaf), more than hints at that film’s magic and menace. In Spazio’s paper cut–influenced dark and starry nighttime vision, Colleen is viewed from the back as she plays the viola da gamba at the edge of a forest by a body of water. A bird descends to the ground, a butterfly floats by a tree, and a cat is curled up in a flower bed. The orphans of Charles Laughton’s classic might as well be floating by, so strongly does the imagery evoke The Night of the Hunter‘s famous riverside ballad sequence.

The CD art’s dark allure, mixing a sense of innocence with sinister undercurrents, is also present in the recording’s title. While a relatively literal translation might be "the still waters," the phrase les ondes silencieuses is also meant to evoke the infrasonic sounds detected only by animals before an earthquake. It’s tempting to view the album’s spare, acoustic arrangements as ballads composed for the moment just before this world’s apocalypse, a perspective that strips away any of the whimsy or preciousness that one might attach to Colleen’s use of antiquated instruments — crystal glass, spinet, and the aforementioned viola da gamba — to create and play these latest compositions.

In the past, Colleen has been associated with unique electronic recordings such as last year’s lengthy EP, Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique, which is composed of and constructed from loops of music-box melodies. On that recording, "Rock a Bye Baby" and "Pop Goes the Weasel" are contorted into new shapes, with song titles to match, but most often the enchantment isn’t so easily recognizable, and the atmosphere is haunted rather than whimsical. The minimalist symphonic effect of "What Is a Componium? — Part 2," for instance, suggests Terry Riley in a bad mood. In interviews Colleen has noted that a search for music-box melodies in movies revealed that they were often paired with scenes of rape or murder, an observation that — along with Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique‘s final track, "I’ll Read You a Story," with its oceanic, nighttime waves of classical guitar — brings us right back to the Grimms’ Fairy Tales imagery on the cover of Les Ondes Silencieuses.

Bowed like a cello but with seven strings and guitarlike frets, the viola da gamba is at the center of the disc, which finds Colleen experimenting with acousticity and a live recording style that involves minimal overdubs. This approach yields meditative rewards on "Blue Sands," on which a sea- and seesawing rhythm cuts across delicate fingerpicking. The spidery spinet melodies on "Le Labyrinthe" and forlorn duet between clarinet and acoustic guitar on "Sun Against My Eyes" are as unsettlingly beautiful. There’s a persistent sense of lightlike sound intensifying and then fading into deep empty space, especially on "Echoes and Coral," on which Colleen plays crystal glass in a manner that suggests Aphex Twin at his most ambient as much as it suggests one of her instrumental influences, Harry Partch. As one listens, it’s hard not to think about the precataclysmic aspect of the album title. In fact, while The Night of the Hunter is on the top of Colleen’s list of favorite films, the final position is occupied by Apocalypse Now.

Much like his cousin in classical guitar composition Colleen, Jose Gonzalez employs acoustic reverberation as a musical metaphor for personal or universal being. That sounds heady, but the appeal of Gonzalez’s music stems from its unadorned, understated direct address. On In Our Nature (Mute/Imperial), Gonzalez maintains his trademark tender brevity, but there’s a stronger sense of lingering discord — brought across through the increased force of his open strumming and plucked bass notes — than on his 2003 debut, Veneer (Mute), or the 2005 EP Stay in the Shade (Hidden Agenda). The tension suits a collection of disenchanted songs that apply equally to world affairs and affairs of the heart.

Gonzalez has partly made his name through transformative cover versions of electronic pop songs such as the Knife’s "Heartbeats" and Kylie Minogue’s "Hand on Your Heart," and on In Our Nature he performs similar wonders with Massive Attack’s "Teardrop," using his vulnerable tenor to make the word feathers float and the word breath breathe. Just as contemporary Devendra Banhart can err on the side of poetic whimsy, Gonzalez can tend toward overly literal earnestness.

But both possess special talents. Gonzalez’s is pensive. "Abram" uses the figure from the Torah, Bible, and Koran to chide religion, and throughout "Time to Send Someone Away" his recriminations against obesity and war lust are sung in a voice so sweet and soft it’s a surprise to realize the words are meant to sting. In Our Nature rivals or even matches the bittersweet wisdom of Caetano Veloso’s sublime first album in exile — 1971’s Caetano Veloso (a Little More Blue) (Philips) — on "Down the Line," on which the word compromising gives way to the word colonizing above frantically swaying six-string melodies and rhythms. "Don’t let the darkness eat you up," Gonzalez repeats insistently at the song’s close. There’s paradox in the hopefulness of his ever-beautiful tone, as if a darkness that eats up evil just might be fine.

COLLEEN

With Beirut

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $25

Herbst Theatre

War Memorial Veterans Bldg.

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 551-2000

www.anotherplanetent.com

JOSE GONZALEZ

With Tiny Vipers

Mon/8–Tues/9, 8 p.m., $20–$22

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Fresh air

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I could tell you about the river," Bill Callahan bellows on "From the Rivers to the Ocean," the opening salvo of his most recent record, Woke on a Whaleheart (Drag City). There’s a pregnant pause, he drops his voice between ascending piano chords — "Or …" — and then a sweet melody buoys the rest of the line, "… we could just get in." After filing 11 albums as Smog or (smog), Callahan begins the first recorded under his own name with a promise of directness, a promise that specifically harks back to Smog’s previous full-length, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (Drag City). That album’s patterned evocations of nature and memory signaled a deep, inchoate sense of regeneration. These currents seem more matter-of-fact on the gospel-flavored Woke on a Whaleheart. Take, for instance, the first single, "Diamond Dancer," a limber bar band groove that opens with the dreamy nursery rhyme "She was dancing so hard/ She danced herself into a diamond/ Dancing all by herself/ And not minding."

Of course, with Callahan things are never so simple. In that same opening verse of "From the Rivers to the Ocean," he exhorts, "Have faith in wordless knowledge." It’s a clear sentiment made less so by the voice delivering it: a voice for which language is all, a means to both intimate and deflect. This push-pull is essential to Callahan’s aesthetic and a big part of why his records are the kind of constant companions whose grooves you wear out. I ask him by e-mail about his connection to the album format, and he writes back, "There will be an exciting time when us album makers will be Mad Max types, battling over the only analog recording equipment and vinyl pressing plants left in the world. This has already started…. Steve Albini bought all the remaining stock of paper leader in the world…. He gave me enough maybe to last the rest of my life, as long as I don’t go crazy with it."

Meaning, I suppose, that there’s still plenty of Callahan to come, a fact that should not be taken for granted. After all, many of his contemporaries didn’t make it through the murk of ’90s indie irony — a notable exception being Callahan’s Drag City labelmate Will Oldham. Callahan was readily heralded in those years for Smog albums like 1997’s Red Apple Falls and 1999’s Knock-Knock (both Drag City), but it often seemed a kind of backhand praise, with critics reductively categorizing Callahan’s music as downcast or deadpan — the same simplistic tropes attributed to Jim Jarmusch’s independent films.

Even for those of us paying closer attention to the gradual refinements across Callahan’s discography, though, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love still had the feeling of a gauntlet being thrown: a powerfully cohesive suite of songs brought off by a newly confident voice, fuller in timbre and all the more steeped in Callahan’s sly sense for forthright obfuscation. If that recording was the watershed for a surprising second act, Woke on a Whaleheart shows the newly Smog-less Callahan in a loose, expansive mood. The album’s a grower, and while I’m not wholly taken with Neil Michael Hagerty’s glitzy production, it’s nice sensing that Callahan feels at home enough in his voice to open it up to some more varied collaborations.

I ask him, foolishly perhaps, if he feels like he has a fuller sense of himself after completing these records. "I don’t reckon so," he replies. "It’s more like a chess move. You watch to see what happens, and then you make your next move."

BILL CALLAHAN

Sun/7, 2:15 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Porch Stage

Also with Sir Richard Bishop

Sun/7, 9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com


HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: The Sadies

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On the horn from his native Toronto, Sadies vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Dallas Good sounds as courtly and old-world as any immaculately suited and Stetsoned gentleman picker doing time in Boys bands that go by the name of Blue Grass or Foggy Mountain. But make no mistake: Good’s combo is all about the here and now, as evidenced by its new full-length, New Seasons (Yep Roc), which nods to the fleet-fingered hillbilly hotshots of yesteryear ("What’s Left Behind") as well as ’60s-era native sons like the Dillards and the Byrds ("Yours to Discover") and roots de- and reconstructionists like guest Howe Gelb and producer Gary Louris ("Wolf Tones"). And then there’s the musician’s personal hall of fame. "So far it’s been our experience that we can appeal to audiences of drastically different musical styles," Good says, selecting his words as carefully as he might an instrument.

Everything from Black Flag to George Jones?

"Given that, bar none, those are two of my favorite artists," Good, 33, continues, perking up. "There’s no separation between my love for hardcore and country. The single greatest strength in West Coast music output is not what they did in the ’60s — that trophy would go to Texas, I’m afraid." He chuckles. "I would go with the ’80s and the SST roster. In any case, we don’t feel alienated from that audience, that’s for sure.

"We play as fast as anyone."

And they have as sensitive a touch as the Possum’s, which explains why Neko Case, John Doe, Ronnie Hawkins, and, as with their Oct. 5 show, the Mekons’ Jon Langford have asked the Sadies for backing. Such collaborators as Andre Williams, the Band’s Garth Hudson, and Jon Spencer’s Heavy Trash have also lined up to work with the group.

San Francisco will be the site of a kind of homecoming for Good and his brother, vocalist–guitarist–fiddle player Travis: their father, Bruce, is a member of the Canadian bluegrass ensemble the Good Brothers, who, coincidentally, were flown to the city by the Grateful Dead, friends from their mutual Festival Express outing, to record their 1972 debut for Columbia. "Long-haired bluegrass," Dallas describes it, adding that his father and his mother, Margaret, will join the Sadies onstage, as they did in the studio for New Seasons. "I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree." (Kimberly Chun)

THE SADIES

With Jon Langford

Fri/5, 10 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Sun/7, 11:45 a.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Star Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: John Prine

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Although he has never made it commercially, John Prine has been considered one of the premier songwriters in Americana and folk since his first album, John Prine (Atlantic), came out in 1971. "Sam Stone," the story of a Vietnam vet turned junkie, "Hello in There," made a hit by Joan Baez, and the monumental "Angel from Montgomery" were instantly and forever pasted on the American psyche, even if Prine has never reached household-name status.

Prine released records steadily through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, without a drop-off in quality. His talent lies in sketching the stories of everyday people and injecting the characters with the most human emotions in a way that adds a literary depth to the songs without stumbling into the heavy-handedness many folk writers fall prey to. Delivered in his characteristic scratchy tone, Prine’s songs can almost literally kill you if you listen to them at the wrong time. "Far from Me" is one of those. Be very careful here.

His latest album, Standard Songs for Average People (Oh Boy), is a laid-back collection of country covers performed with bluegrass vocalist Mac Wiseman. The pair perform some known numbers — "Saginaw, Michigan" and "Old Rugged Cross" — and cover tunes by Tom T. Hall and Prine pal Kris Kristofferson. An operation to remove cancer from his throat in 1999 has given Prine an even more distinctive voice, and now when he plays his older material, such as the numbers off 2000’s Souvenirs (Oh Boy), it finally sounds as if the words being sung aren’t coming from a precocious 21-year-old but from some world-weary everyman who lives behind the Greyhound station. Simply put, Prine is one of the most talented folksingers America has ever produced. He has two types of songs: great songs and really great songs.

JOHN PRINE

Sat/6, 1:30 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Star Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: The Mekons

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I used to think this was such a self-deprecating title — The Curse of The Mekons — but over the years I’ve come to a much different conclusion about the declaration being made by these punk–post-punk–posteverything spark plugs on their landmark 1991 Blast First album. Now celebrating their third decade together as a band, the Mekons do indeed suffer from a curse: their ability to switch effortlessly from style to style, sometimes even within the same song, without a single slip. Oh, affliction of afflictions! What a curse it must be, having to decide whether to blow listeners’ minds with a punk, a reggae, or a country song or a tune in any of the myriad other forms they’ve mastered….

With their latest, Natural (Quarterstick), the infinitely charming Jon Langford and Sally Timms — purveyors of some of the finest concert banter you’ll ever hope to hear — lead the rest of the scrappy brigade through a dozen distinctively skewed takes on rootsy campfire folk. Timms gets flat-out spooky on "White Stone Door," a drifting specter of a song heightened by sobs of violin. Meanwhile, Langford’s Brian Jones–referencing folk-reggae rouser "Cockermouth" is sure to be an instant crowd favorite, an ode to roamers and wanderers that speaks volumes about the anything-goes spirit that makes the Mekons so extraordinary. (Todd Lavoie)

THE MEKONS

Fri/5, 7:30 p.m., $15

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Also Sun/7, 2:05 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Star Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Charlie Louvin

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A duet is a delicate thing, often recognized as romantic exhibitionism, rapport spilling forth. In classic Americana arrangements, in which verses are traded back and forth and choruses framed by intricate harmonies, the duet possesses a trippy if not schizophrenic grace: a singer begins the story, then it’s suddenly someone else’s. We hear of a brother’s death, and then that brother is heard harmonizing on the chorus.

While such magic is snide but joyful on albums such as Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens’s Just Between the Two of Us (Capitol, 1966), for Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Louvin, who lost his brother Ira, the other half of the legendary Louvin Brothers, to a car crash in 1965, the very idea of a duet is forever haunting. Yet he has continued to pursue it, with his rolling twang and sparkling eyes, well into his 80th year. Louvin has never lost his knack for the unique type of "shape-note singing" he and Ira developed, a blend of gospel harmonies and Appalachian musical forms inspired by other early bluegrass troubadours.

For his self-titled release on Tompkins Square earlier this year, Louvin cast spells with some younger collaborators. Clem Snide’s Eef Barzelay adds compelling, indecipherable emotion to "The Christian Life," originally on the Louvin Brothers’ remarkable Satan Is Real (Capitol, 1960). Alex McManus of Bright Eyes paints careful vocal touches on the Carter Family tune "The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea." Amid a lyrical landscape of graveyards, bloodied rivers, and ill-fated lovers, Louvin continues to light up the shadows, with a few yelps from friends old and new. (Ari Messer)

CHARLIE LOUVIN

Sat/6, 2 p.m., free

Amoeba Music

1855 Haight, SF

www.amoeba.com

Sun/7, 12:55 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Rooster Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass: Emmylou Harris

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Emmylou Harris tends to overwhelm with her beauty in flesh and in voice, so it’s instructive to look to her new rarities collection, Songbird: Rare Tracks and Forgotten Gems (Rhino), for reminders of earthly frailty. From the get-go, the recording reveals that even she has feet of clay. Harris can be derivative — exhibit A: disc one’s "Clocks." This early song displays her in warbly thrush mode. She sounds like a Judy Collins also-ran, and this is a good thing. For the one negative that can be ascribed to Harris the icon is the way she has been saddled with the male-reified pose of tasteful, circumspect handmaiden to Saint Gram Parsons. Such a misstep, alongside the breadth of Harris’s myriad career highs, deflates the myth to human size. I love my Georgia homeboy Parsons and am well aware of the degree to which Harris’s torch bearing is self-appointed, but one still wonders how her progress might have looked were she not stifled by such a fantasy.

Apocrypha has acolyte Harris seeking advice from folkie god Pete Seeger on how to infuse her material with bite in the face of a relatively dulcet reality. While the voice was and remains undeniable in its beauty and harmonic gifts, this box reaffirms that Harris’s intersection with Parsons was the vital source of that infusion of grit and angst. This can be seen in their twangy gospel "The Old Country Baptizing," but her trail also leads in other fascinating directions, toward the hallucinatory spook of "Snake Song." Songbird‘s other boons are a swath of Harris’s fabled collaborations with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, as well as a rewind to a range of guests as diverse as the late Waylon Jennings, Beck, Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, and her great band Spyboy. This is certainly a good example of curating a legacy — something to contemplate when the historied Harris takes the stage at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

EMMYLOU HARRIS

Sun/7, 5:45 p.m., free

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Banjo Stage

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Smokin’ grass

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San Francisco’s biggest – and likely best – free outdoor music festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, returns for year seven, boasting such performers as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, T Bone Burnett and friends like John Mellencamp, Los Lobos, Gillian Welch, the Knitters, Nick Lowe, Boz Scaggs and the Blue Velvet Band, the Flatlanders, Teddy Thompson, Hazel Dickens, the Mother Hips, Heartless Bastards, Steve Earle – the list goes on. Check out some of our favorites:

Bill Callaghan

Emmylou Harris

Charlie Louvin

The Mekons

John Prine

The Sadies

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

The free festival happens Oct. 5, beginning at 3 p.m., and Oct. 6 to 7, starting at 11 a.m., at Speedway, Lindley, and Marx meadows in Golden Gate Park, SF. For more information on all of the performers and events, go to www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Beauty and the beasts

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SCREAM QUEEN What kind of a woman tempts both Dracula and Frankenstein? Gorgeous Veronica Carlson, that’s who — star of Hammer classics Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969). Now an artist and devoted grandmother living in Florida, Carlson’s coming to town to share her memories of the golden age of British goth horror as part of this weekend’s "Shock It to Me!" film fest. I spoke with the classy Carlson over the phone to get some blood-curdling scoop.

SFBG Were you always a fan of horror films?

VERONICA CARLSON Absolutely! I skipped college classes to go and see them. I was a fan of the gothic horror of Hammer. It was absolutely magical. [Movies today, as well as the real world,] are too scary — you could be safely horrified back then.

SFBG What was it like working at the Hammer studios?

VC The set was always beautiful, and [after I got my hair and makeup done] I would wander around and just see everything, all the details. It was quite extraordinary. I loved every minute of it. When I wasn’t in a scene, I would sit and watch the other actors and be part of it.

SFBG Who’s scarier, Dracula or Frankenstein?

VC When [Christopher Lee] is in character, he is really spooky. But then when Peter [Cushing] is his own cold self, he’s really scary too — that cold, calcuutf8g, distant person that’s chopping people up. They’re so convincing in what they do. I can’t choose who’s worse!

SHOCK IT TO ME!

Fri/5–Sun/7, $6–$10 (festival pass, $48)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.shock-it-to-me.com

Take it sleazy

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CULT FILM Erstwhile cofounder of San Francisco’s late, lamented Werepad — a "beatnik space lounge" (among other things) — Jacques Boyreau, also a filmmaker (Candy Von Dewd), lives in Portland, Ore., these days. But he’s dropping into town again with a characteristic surprise package in the form of the Supertrash Peepshow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We’re promised a slide show and lecture revealing the "secret schools of design" in vintage exploitation movie posters and other pop ephemera, as showcased in Boyreau’s new coffee-table tome, Supertrash, a sequel to 2002’s eye-popping volume Trash. Then, to dive more deeply into the cinematic sleaze of yore, he’ll present a true rarity: the fragrantly named Fleshpot on 42nd Street, the final sexploitation epic of notorious grade-Z Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan. It was one of his few real hits — if only on the 1973 downtown grindhouse circuit — but has since become one of the least-remembered titles in an already obscure oeuvre (The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!, The Ghastly Ones), since only a single print survives.

Fleshpot juggles Milligan’s usual hysteria, misanthropy, crude technique, and ripe dialogue with more restrained, realistic aspects in line with mainstream counterculture downers of the period like The Panic in Needle Park and Go Ask Alice. Heroine Dusty (Laura Cannon, a.k.a. Diane Lewis) is a morally lax looker who splits when her latest sugar daddy asks her to, like, pick up after herself. She thus goes from "playing house with some guy in Queens" to playing house with a real queen: blond-fright-wigged Cherry (Neil Flanagan), a tranny hooker pal who says, "Why don’t we join forces? We could both turn quite a few each night if we play our cards right!"

Swapping abusive, money-pinching tricks, these two indelicate souls are well matched: she’s a petty thief who hates sex but would rather trick than work a regular job, and he’s an even crasser soul who sobs, "I’m no prize package: a cocksucker — not even a good one. Too weird to be called a man, too old to try and look like one!" It’s a shock when Dusty meets a guy who’s nice, employed, and genuinely likes her — Bob, played by no less than Deep Throat porn legend Harry Reems. Of course, in the Milligan universe this rare glimpse of happiness (let alone good, consensual intercourse) is doomed to end tragically. Lurid, lively, and cheap as a back-alley BJ, Fleshpot embodies a particular brand of movie entertainment that you can’t get anymore in a public space. When it’s over, you’ll want to be hosed off.

SUPERTRASH PEEPSHOW

Thurs/4, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Gay times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A series of slide projections cycling through a gamut of theater posters greets audiences taking their seats at Theatre Rhinoceros’s 30th season opener. Ranging in design from the openly trashy to the quietly tony, many of these posters offer eye-catching portions of skin and equally intriguing titles: Cocksucker: A Love Story, Deporting the Divas, Pogey Bait, Show Ho, Intimate Details, Barebacking, and Hillbillies on the Moon. It adds up to a hefty if scantily clad body of work that owes its existence to a good extent to the advent of Theatre Rhinoceros. Begun in 1977 by Alan Estes in a SoMa leather bar with a production of Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, the Rhino today is the longest-running LGBT theater in the country.

Thirty years like these call for a moment of reflection, and the Rhino’s lasts a brisk and enjoyable 70 minutes. Conceived and directed by John Fisher, who became artistic director in 2002, Theatre Rhinoceros: The First Thirty Years takes a jaunty look back at a raucous, at times traumatic, but overall remarkable theatrical career intimately tied to the social and political history of the queer community. While making no attempt to be exhaustive, or exhausting, Fisher’s swift, celebratory pastiche (with dramaturgy by actor and associate artistic director Matt Weimer) neatly suggests the range of artistic output and the sweep of events and personalities that have gone into defining the theater and its times.

The bulk of the show comprises a choice selection of scenes and songs from productions past (with some original compositions and arrangements by Don Seaver and snazzy choreography by Angeline Young), put on by a capable five-person ensemble, all but one veterans of previous Rhino shows. Sporadically introduced by Fisher — who as MC strikes the right note at once, with a deadpan motorized entrance onto a stage decked out (by designer John Lowe) in a shimmering red glitter curtain worthy of Cher or Merv Griffin — the selections progress more or less chronologically, though the cast leads off with a rendition of "Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid," from the musical of the same name by lyricist Henry Mach and composer Paul Katz, which was a hit for the Rhino in 1990. It’s an apt piece to introduce part one of the show, "Coming Out/Living Out," the first of four sections charting the development of the theater and its audience.

Other highlights include a scene from Theresa Carilli’s Dolores Street, an early lesbian-themed play that marked the Rhino’s (at the time somewhat controversial) turn to more inclusive queer programming. It’s a still tart and funny comedy about the relationships in a young lesbian household in San Francisco, at least judging by the scene expertly reproduced by Laurie Bushman and Alice Pencavel.

The live sequences come interspersed with videotaped interviews of Rhino founders and associates, including Lanny Baugniet, P.A. Cooley, Donna Davis, and Tom Ammiano. The cast also reads excerpts from letters to the theater from subscribers and some well-known playwrights, most offering praise and thanks, others caviling at the quality of a specific production, expressing indignation over liberties taken with a script, or offering resistance to the changes in programming that opened the stage to lesbian themes and, eventually, many other queer voices. (It’s indicative of how far things have come that a letter like this last one, which pointed to once serious divisions in the larger gay community, elicited only comfortable laughter from the opening night’s audience.)

In part two, "AIDS," the ensemble re-creates highlights from the Rhino’s historic long-running revue, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. A collaborative venture between 20 Bay Area artists and an unprecedented, defiantly upbeat response to the terrifying onset of the AIDS crisis, the show took aim at the still largely repressed issue of safe sex through such numbers as Karl Brown and Matthew McQueen’s cheeky sizzler "Rimmin’ at the Baths" and their equally clever and forthright "Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times" (both beautifully rendered by the full cast of Theatre Rhinoceros), as well as the terrible toll in drastically foreshortened lives (seen here from the perspective of a mother, affectingly played by Bushman, in Adele Prandini’s "Momma’s Boy"). The AIDS Show, which went on to tour the country and put the Rhino on the national map, premiered to packed houses in 1984, the year its creator and Rhino founder Estes died of the disease.

This show’s parts three and four deal with the growing diversity of voices and issues in the years of relative liberation and mainstream exposure for the LGBT population. A scene from Brad Erickson’s Sexual Irregularities (played by Weimer and Kim Larsen) broaches the conflict between homosexuality and religion, a theme increasingly explored in new work for the stage, while one from Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas (played by Larsen and Mike Vega) points to the increasing presence of minority voices, reporting on the gay experience from the perspectives of particular ethnic subcultures.

In the postmodern micropolitics of sexual identity characteristic of the new millennium (and spoofed hilariously by Weimer, Larsen, and Vega in a scene from Fisher’s Barebacking), queer theater is characterized by increasingly hybrid categories and a plethora of voices from all sectors of experience. The cast sums up the road thus far with a characteristically proud and wry glance at the possibilities ahead in the show’s final, original number, "The Rhino" (by Seaver, with lyrics by Weimer). But, to invoke an older song, anything goes.

THEATRE RHINOCEROS: THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

Through Oct. 14

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 861-5079

www.therhino.org

Now there’s a Cure

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Are you for reals? Seriously, dude, when the going continues on its war path, peace-promoting Buddhist monks land in Myanmar jails, and Pamela Anderson grasps at marriage straws once again — with Paris Hilton sex-vid jock Rick Salomon, yet — we can all safely say that reality looks to be drastically overvalued.

How else to explain the fact that the biggest music news in the past week was pranked out as now-it’s-true-now-it’s-not-now-it’s-true-again fiction: the would-be Meg White sex tape starring a black-haired lady who looks absolutely nothing like the besieged drummer — no wonder White’s acutely anxious; sometimes they really are out to get you — and a faux Radiohead new-album announcement that shuffled you toward a YouTube page flying a pretty hee-hee-larious music video for furiously hip-swiveling ’80s pop star Rick Astley’s "Never Gonna Give You Up." Then hot on Astley’s wiggly behind came the real — I think — announcement of Radiohead’s Nigel Godrich–produced seventh, In Rainbows; the band’s fan service is now taking your order at radiohead.com for the MP3 download (arriving Oct. 10) and blown-out double vinyl and CD "Discbox" including exclusive art and photos, a CD of additional songs, and bundled MP3s, all of which sounds like a way for Radiohead to test the self-release waters à la Prince.

So what’s the next reality hack, hoaxsters? An imminent Led Zeppelin reunion spotlighting the reanimated corpse of John Bonham, thanks to Jimmy Page’s rumored Aleister Crowley connections? A "Big Girls Don’t Cry"–flogging Fergie auditions for the Pussycat Dolls, fronted by Jersey Boys–revived, "Big Girls Don’t Cry" flailer Frankie Valli?

Going against the tide of such prankery is UK goth pop vet Robert Smith of the Cure, famous for his singles-chart cri de coeur "Boys Don’t Cry." I’ve never been a rabid Cure fan, but I must admit that the voluble, down-to-earth Smith won me over with his earnest intelligence in a call from his studio outside Brighton, where the band is embroiled in its forthcoming double album. Making further inroads against fakery, Smith told me he’s been writing more "socially aware lyrics" than he normally pens. "Obviously I live in the real world, contrary to what a lot of people think," he said. "I get angry about things, and I thought it was time for me to put those things into songs."

"It’s just kind of insane," he continued. "The world seems to be reverting almost to the Middle Ages, with the rise of the idiocy of religion. The whole policing of thought and action is anathema to any artist. Any artist has to react!" He described "Us or Them," off the band’s last self-titled LP (Geffen, 2004), as the closest he’s gotten to writing a song protesting "childish, black-and-white portrayals of the world — that isn’t a world I want to live in!"

It’s just been a matter of fitting the words to the right music; otherwise, Smith said, "it sounds like I’m singing, quite literally, from a different hymn book." The band recorded more than 25 songs two years ago, rerecorded them last year, and is back at work on them, although the Cure will take a brief break to play the Download Festival in the Bay Area despite pushing the rest of their North American tour to next year. "We can postpone 27 shows, but we can’t postpone Download Festival," he said. "So we’re just doin’ it! We’re coming over on the Friday, playing that Saturday, and then home on Sunday and going back to the studio. So it’s quite a bizarre weekend for us, but good fun."

The return of on-off guitarist Porl Thompson seems to have inspired the Cure’s latest surge in creativity, though the shock-headed vocalist’s involvement in the band’s recent live DVD, The Cure: Festival 2005, interrupted progress on the double album, which Smith said he will mix and Geffen will release at the same price as the single-album version, which someone else will mix. Smith is wagering most listeners will want to buy the double CD for the price of one. "The difficulty now is to get the digital domain to accede to our wishes and price two songs at the price of one," he said, though ultimately he’s not worried. "I’m at the stage now — well, I’ve always been at the stage — of making music primarily for myself, that I enjoy, and then for Cure fans. So whether or not it’s commercial is not a great concern."

The plan so far is to release three singles, he said. "One is a very heavy, dark single, one is an incredibly upbeat, stupid pop single, and one is out-and-out dance, so that shows you the variety of stuff on the record."

Stupid? How can anyone as obviously smart as Smith go for that? "I’m saying that most good pop singles are stupid — otherwise they’re not good pop singles," he demurred. "I’m from an age when disposable wasn’t necessarily a bad thing." *

THE CURE

Download Festival

Sat/6, 2 p.m., $29.50–$75

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View

www.ticketmaster.com

GET A LOAD OF THIS

YELLOW SWANS


Ex-Guardian staffer and guitarist Gabriel Mindel returns to the scene of so much aural mayhem alongside electronic blitzkrieg Pete Swanson. With Mouthus and NVH. Wed/3, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

ALIENS


Psych pop meets Larry David? What else from the former Beta Band–niks? With Augie March and Kate Johnson. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

DATAROCK


Norwegian nü ravers pop it up with Foreign Born. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $13. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

"GIRLSTOCK"


Organizer Mael Flowers busts out the bands, belly dancing, spoken word, art, and free barbecue at this benefit for local groups helping those living with HIV/AIDS. Sat/6, Mama Buzz Café, 2318 Telegraph, and the Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. For more info, go to www.girlstock.com

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